


we'll all float on all right

by Siria



Series: Nantucket AU [49]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-04
Updated: 2008-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-03 20:29:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nantucket is baking slowly in the July heat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we'll all float on all right

**Author's Note:**

> For Jenn and Aesc. Betaed by Cate.

Nantucket is baking slowly in the July heat: the sun's nowhere near its zenith, but the temperature is already in the low 90s, the sky bright blue and sunlight bouncing off clear water, a trace of humidity hanging in the air that not even the sea breeze can carry away. Rodney knows this, not because he's ventured outside to experience it, but because he's got a widget sitting on his desktop that lets him know of each tiny change in the UV index. He could open the back door to gain first-hand evidence, true, but Rodney doesn't actually want to go _out_ in it—heat this bad makes him cranky, unable to sleep and all the more ill-tempered for the lack of it, and he's not able to concentrate on his work when his t-shirt is clinging damply to his back with sweat.

John, of course, exults in it in a body made for sun worship: the sun bleaching highlights in his dark hair and spattering freckles across the broad span of his shoulders. He'd disappeared outside as soon as the sun rose, Cash bouncing at his heels, but Rodney is a creature of temperate climes, a devotee of AC and iced coffee. He squints out the kitchen window at the beach, at the hazy, indistinct line where sea meets sky. He doesn't get the attraction, quite frankly, and shifts miserably in his seat, pen faltering to a stop against the page. If he has another iced latte, he thinks, he might be able to cool down enough to get some work done... or maybe if he goes upstairs and sits in a cold bath for a bit...

Rodney's still considering his options when the back door flies open and John bounds in, damp and beaming. He's obviously been into the water—his grey t-shirt's balled up in one hand, his running shorts in the other, and if it weren't for the fact that his boxers are dark blue, not white, the way they're clinging to him right now could well leave him open to prosecution for public indecency.

"There are _laws_," Rodney mutters, because that's not playing fair: he'd like to see John try to concentrate on the mass-gap problem if he were faced with a sight like that.

John blinks at him, but doesn't bother questioning the seeming non sequitur, attuned by now to the twists and turns of Rodney's brain. "Sure," he says carefully, then reaches across the kitchen table, spattering salt water across Rodney's carefully heaped piles of paper so that he can snap closed the lid of Rodney's Powerbook. "Come on, upstairs, find your swim trunks. Water's great."

"Excuse me," Rodney says, waving his hands around to encompass all of John and his hair and the line of his belly, "Mister, mister... whatever" — he can be excused for his lack of stinging repartee, he thinks, it's not even ten in the morning, he's only had two coffees so far, and the way those boxers are clinging to the soft swell of John's cock would bring a lesser man to his knees; has done so with Rodney on several occasions — "Just because you have time to go frolicking about in the sea like an extra from a Darryl Hannah movie doesn't mean that _some of us_ don't have work to do. I have deadlines, commissions, a grand theory of everything to come up with!"

He refuses point blank to go down to the beach. He refuses when John snags him by the neck of his shirt and pulls him up the stairs; he refuses when John stands with him in the middle of their bedroom and kisses him, complaints stuttering out between each lazy movement of John's lips against his, while John strips him out of his t-shirt and his too-heavy khaki shorts; he refuses even when John tosses him his rarely used swim trunks and says "Put 'em on, Rodney, and quit your yapping."

John gets changed too, kicking off his boxers and tugging on a pair of trunks that are a little more decent, a little less eurotrash. Rodney isn't entirely enthused by the change, but anything that stops John getting arrested for being a lethal combination of hot and oblivious is a good thing.

They clatter down the steps to the beach, and by the time they've crossed the sand, Rodney's mostly resigned to having to go into the water. Mostly. He stands there for a little while, squinting at it from the safe distance of a couple of feet, and calculating all over again whether or not his home-made sunscreen will continue to work following immersion in water. His skin is very sensitive.

John rushed right in, of course, and is currently doing his best impression of an overgrown sea-lion—playing Frisbee out in the surf with Cash, the lean length of his thighs working as he pushes his way through the booming surf. Rodney realises with a certain degree of discomfort that actually, those black swim trunks cling to certain muscles of John's in ways that, well... He shifts, all too aware that there are certain reactions that _his_ trunks won't hide, no matter how dry they are.

"Rodney!" John yells, his words carried on a freshening breeze that brings some measure of respite from the heat, leaving the sharp taste of salt at the back of Rodney's throat. "Come on, it's not going to bite!"

"Jellyfish!" Rodney answers morosely. "Great white sharks, smaller white sharks, melanoma, unknown sewage leaks, crabs, eels, sand in strange places..."

John wades towards him. Rodney resolutely doesn't tremble at the sight: John with his lean, wet torso and with the, the _thighs_, and even over the crash of the waves and the splash of his progress, Rodney can hear him sigh. "Just asking you to come for a swim, buddy, not recreate _Jaws_."

Rodney eyes him. "Do you _know_ the statistics for death by shark in US territorial waters?"

"Nope. You?" John's arching an eyebrow at him; the unperturbed look on his face is the expression he always seems to adopt when he's laughing inside.

Rodney can feel himself deflate. "Me either," he says sadly.

"C'mon, Eeyore. You'll be fine," John replies, reaching out to clap him on the shoulder.

Rodney sighs and looks down at his feet; the tide's been coming in, swifter than he'd expected, and water is swirling in a white froth around his ankles. He's damp already, not to mention that John is very, very persistent, possibly second only to Rodney himself in the stubbornness stakes. John's going to make him go into the sea, and Rodney's going to have to admit to it. He hates having to own up to stuff—when said stuff is not directly related to the subject of his own brilliance, at least. "There... may actually be a slight problem," he says.

"Problem," John echoes slowly, before his eyes widen in comprehension. "You can't swim?"

"How _do_ you define ability, exactly?" Rodney says quickly, shifting his weight from foot to foot and feeling fine-grained sand ooze between his toes. "It's such a _broad_ term..."

"I don't know," John says, "How about if I dropped you in the deep end of a swimming pool? Sink or swim?"

"In that case... like a stone," Rodney says miserably.

"Is this, like, a... thing?" John says, moving over so that he's standing close enough for Rodney to reach out and touch him if he wanted, just far enough away that Rodney won't feel as if he's being coerced into anything. "Or do you just..."

"No, no." Rodney shakes his head impatiently; he doesn't much like being handled by anyone, even by John. "There was just... it just never seemed like there was time when I was a kid, and my mom didn't like spending money on frivolities like trips to the pool and then... Well, afterwards it just seemed like it was a little late to ever bother, is all."

"Want me to show you?" John says. "I'd probably suck as a teacher, but..." He lifts one shoulder, making such a show of nonchalance that Rodney knows the offer has to be utterly sincere.

Rodney tilts his chin upwards. "I don't think that I'd exactly make for the world's best student. I've been told I lack, um..."

"Tact?" John says, breaking into a grin. "Patience, willingness to listen, _ability_ to listen..."

"There is _nothing_ wrong with my ability to listen!" Rodney yelps, indignant, pressing up close to John, the water cool around his shins while he points out the myriad ways in which his intellectual capacity is more — more! — than capable of absorbing anything which John might be able to teach him.

"Rodney?" John says, cutting him off just as he's really getting going.

Rodney scowled up at him. "What?"

John grins sunnily and says "Oh, nothing," airily enough that Rodney has enough time to ready himself for disaster. John lashes out with one foot; he might have long since forgotten how to stand to attention, or what a regulation hair cut looks like, but it seems like some things the Air Force teaches you you never forget, and Rodney flails when John catches him around the ankles and sends him sprawling backwards into the surf.

He hits the water flailing just as a larger than usual wave breaks over his head. Rodney's submerged, salt water flooding into his nose and his eyes and his ears, and when he gasps, startled, for air, it rushes into his mouth. He comes up spluttering, gagging, cursing John and his ancestors back to the seventh generation for bastards, ingrates, _donkey fuckers_, because there's no other biologically plausible explanation for the _har har har_ that John's unleashing now.

"You!" Rodney bellows, voice like the wrath of every TA who's ever had to cow a group of unruly undergrads. He struggles over to John, pushing his way through the surf to chase him. John is walking backwards, heading further out to sea and still laughing, the sunlight dancing through the spray thrown up behind him to halo him. "_You_—" Rodney manages again, flustered and aggravated almost beyond words, before using the advantage of speed and mass to dunk John under the blue-green waves, ruffling his hair ferociously so that when John finally breaks back through to the air, his hair stands up in a mass of salt-stiffened spikes.

Cash encourages them on from dry land, his barks excited and high-pitched, and the battle is appropriately epic: Rodney's hands slipping over skin that's water-sleek and warm from soaked-up sun, gripping against the hard curve of a bicep or the tailored line of a hipbone, concentration wavering whenever John manages to scrape his blunt nails over Rodney's belly, nip at the firm flesh of his shoulder, each of them trying their best to unbalance the other sufficiently to make them flail and topple beneath the waves.

By the time they declare a draw, a truce, peace between them, they're both grasping for breath, their laughter close to giggles and their muscles aching. Rodney's not able to do anything more than lie back and let the waves bear him up, too pliant from happiness to do anything else than drift. John's next to him, waist deep in the body-warm water; squinting through eyes narrowed by the noonday sun, and with his vision blurred by his eyelashes, Rodney can make out only the indistinct shape of him, the lean stretch of his torso, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes.

"Hey, buddy," John says softly, and Rodney hums in reply, a smile on his face that John catches when he stoops to kiss him—lightly, gently, the two of them rocking in time with the rhythm of their bodies, the waves, the tides.

Rodney grins up at him when John pulls away, knowing he must look a little dopey but uncaring, unheeding when there's nothing surrounding him but warmth and water, air and John: and the laughter lines around John's eyes crinkle up when he says "See? Lesson one. All you gotta do is float."


End file.
